Paul Vanier Beaulieu 1910 - 1996

Private Collection, Montreal

Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, essay by Germain Lefebvre, P.V. Beaulieu, Montreal, 2009, p. 7

Guy Robert, Paul Vanier Beaulieu (1910-1996), Musée de Mont-Saint-Hilaire, 1996, illustrated in colour on the cover

Michel Beaulieu, P.V. Beaulieu, Ottawa, 1981, p. 72, illustrated in colour

This painting has been viewed under UV and it is in excellent condition.
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Beaulieu studied art in Montreal and Paris before World War II. The political, intellectual and artistic ferment then helped shape his aesthetic ideas, as did the leading artists of the time, including Picasso, whom Beaulieu frequently visited in his studio, until he was interned as an enemy detainee.

After liberation in 1944, Beaulieu continued to be influenced by the modernist movement. He began a series of human figures as acrobats and circus workers, perhaps influenced by Picasso's early paintings of harlequins, jugglers, card players, clowns and others who lived in a circus or music hall environment.

Jouers d'Échecs portrays two boys who display an enigmatic indifference to the game in which they are engaged. Both are in a pensive, laconic mood; perhaps, as Germain Lefèbvre suggests, this recalls the melancholy of his life during his long incarceration. On the wall is a marionette, which, with one pull of the string, could be made to dance. The windows are covered with some kind of sheeting, isolating the figures in the room; no exit is visible. Their colourful shirts contrast with their unwashed feet and baldness, again perhaps a reference to Beaulieu's life as an interned person.

Finally, our attention is drawn back to the chess game, where one gets the impression that the brilliance and strategy of the game can overcome the most menial and impoverished of conditions. People can use play and thought and imagination to survive and even to thrive.